April 08, 2014

The Real Pirates of The Bahamas

Following in the wake of Disney’s blockbuster Pirates of the Caribbean movies, two new American television dramas have been produced based on the period when the Bahamas was a pirate republic.

Black Sails launched on Starz earlier this year. It is written as a prequel to Robert Louis Stevenson's famous novel,Treasure Island, and features both fictional and real-life pirates. The series is filmed in South Africa and includes some nudity as well as cheesy computer-generated pirate ships.

Filmed in Puerto Rico, Crossbones is described as "a fact-based drama that focuses on one of the world’s most notorious real-life pirates”. This is none other than Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard, who is played by John Malkovich.

This series airs on NBC next month and was inspired by the 2007 book, Republic of Pirates, by American journalist Colin Woodard. According to the producers, "This is a story about a man who wants to create a new world, which required us as filmmakers to at least approximate the new world. We basically built a town in Puerto Rico.”

Both Crossbones and Black Sails are set in and around the island of New Providence - which was pirate HQ in the early 1700s. So it is disappointing that neither were filmed in the Bahamas.

Many will recall that two of Johnnie Depp’s Pirates of the Caribbean movies - which have earned hundreds of millions worldwide - were filmed here in the mid-2000s - on Grand Bahama to be exact, at Gold Rock Studios, which took over the former US missile tracking base near High Rock.

Back then, Prime Minister Perry Christie predicted the birth of a new film production industry here in glowing terms. But today, all that remains is some rusting junk along the Grand Bahama shoreline. The most recent Pirates of the Caribbean entry was filmed in Hawaii.

The reason for that, according to Bahamas Film Commissioner Craig Woods, is cost.

Only about 2 per cent of Black Sails was filmed in the Bahamas (at Exuma) because South Africa offered the use of Cape Town Film Studio, plus a film incentive, he said. Crossbones decided on Puerto Rico, after scouting the Bahamas, because of the island's aggressive film incentives.

Pirates of the Caribbean 5 is expected to begin shooting in Puerto Rico at the end of this year, for a 2016 release. Disney moved location shooting from Hawaii to take advantage of the generous tax credits offered by Puerto Rico.

“Proximity doesn't always work if you are a high-cost jurisdiction like the Bahamas,” Woods told me. “Our main business here includes documentary films, music videos, underwater and still photography shoots, fashion and product magazine shoots and TV commercials."

The Bahamas Film Commission (a unit of the Ministry of Tourism) provides hands-on logistical support to producers, but is unable to offer direct financial incentives. Even so, some 187 projects were serviced last year, including five feature films. And several low-budget independent film projects are in the works this year.

THE TRUE-TRUE PIRATE LOCATION

It’s unfortunate that films like Crossbones and Black Sails are not being shot in the Bahamas, because Nassau was actually the geographical centre of the golden age of piracy.

Our reputation as a pirate republic began in 1696 when an English privateer named Henry Avery sailed into Nassau harbour at the helm of a 46-gun warship. “By the character we have had of the people of Providence, we cannot think that the pirate, who was very rich, was unwelcome to them,” historian John Oldmixon wrote in 1741.

There were only about 70 able-bodied men on New Providence when Avery arrived with a crew of more than 100 and a hold full of plunder. After bribing Governor Nicholas Trott, Avery and most of his crew eventually left Nassau with their loot. Although some were later caught, Avery himself was never found and he became a legend in his time.

According to Colin Woodard’s book, Republic of Pirates, “When Henry Avery vanished…the men who would shape the golden age of piracy were boys or very young men (about whom) we know very little.” And the most notorious pirate associated with Nassau was Blackbeard.

During the war of the Spanish Succession, which began in 1702, thousands of British seamen found occupation as privateers attacking Spanish and French shipping in the Caribbean. These activities were tolerated as part of the war effort, but when hostilities ended in 1713 many turned to outright piracy and the British eventually cracked down.

Teach - who was probably born in Bristol about 1680 - was a skilled seaman who, unlike most of his fellows, could read and write. “Like Avery,” Woodard wrote, Teach "had the experience to assume control of what were the most powerful and sophisticated vessels of the day.”

He was an associate of Benjamin Hornigold, another English privateer who refused to give up the fight against the French and Spanish when the war ended in 1713. They both sailed from Jamaica to the Bahamas, which didn’t have a government at the time - Nassau having been sacked twice in the preceding few years.

“When Hornigold and his companions stepped ashore on the beach at Nassau (in 1713),” Woodard wrote, "they found not a town but a collection of partially collapsed buildings overgrown with scrub gathered around the burnt-out shells of a church and fort that Nicholas Trott had constructed a quarter century earlier. On the whole island there were probably fewer than 30 families living in hovels."

Hornigold and Teach oversaw the development of Nassau as a pirate base, attacking shipping in the Florida Straits and stripping their prize vessels in Nassau harbour. Their stolen goods were fenced to accommodating merchants at Harbour Island some 50 miles to the north, which became the leading black market of the day.

“Word of the pirate republic spread throughout the western hemisphere,” Woodard wrote. “Disaffected people continued streaming into Nassau from other colonies…Under the pirates New Providence became a sanctuary for runaway slaves and free mulattoes alike as many moved to join the pirate crew or the merchants, tradesmen and farmers who supported them. The presence of this rogue state was destabilising the slave societies around it."

According to the 18th century writer, Oldmixon, "The pirates had a lodgement with a battery on Harbour Island, and the usual retreat and general receptacle for the pirates are at Providence. King George 1 appointed Woodes Rogers too dislodge the pirates and make provisions for the security and defence of the islands, while offering an amnesty."

When Rogers arrived at Nassau in 1718 with warships and troops, Hornigold and many others accepted the king’s amnesty, while Teach sailed off to the Carolinas to continue his swashbuckling career.

According to the 2012 book, Blackbeard: The Hunt for the World’s Most Notorious Pirate, pictures drawn at the time of his death allude to a man in his mid-30s. His family probably earned their living from Bristol’s maritime interests, which were heavily involved in trade with the American colonies. Rogers also came from Bristol and was about the same age as Blackbeard. And since Blackbeard was an educated man, they might even have known each other.

Teach was not the most prolific nor the most powerful pirate of his day, chroniclers say, but he was very successful at projecting a fearsome image that later storytellers embellished so that "the name of Blackbeard continues to thrill to this day.” it is said that he had 14 wives or mistresses, and it was often reported that Nassuvians liked to trace their ancestry to Blackbeard.

In June 1718, Blackbeard’s fleet was off the coast of North Carolina near the town of Beaufort, where he and some of his crew appeared to settle down after bribing the governor and other merchants and ostensibly taking the king’s pardon.

“In reality, they would quietly continue to detain vessels heading up and down the eastern seaboard, or to and from nearby Virginia,” Woodard recounts. “(Governor) Eden and his friends would fence their goods, and the pirates would benefit from their protection. North Carolina would become, in effect, the new Bahamas.”

But eventually, the governor of neighbouring Virginia, Alexander Spotswood, decided to crack down on these activities, offering a bounty of 100 pounds for Blackbeard’s head. A naval expedition was organised under the command of Lt Robert Maynard, which surprised Blackbeard off the coast of North Carolina in November 1718.

After vicious hand-to-hand fighting, the great pirate was killed - receiving five shot wounds and 20 cutlass wounds. His body was thrown overboard and his head was hung on a pole along the Hampton River - at a place now called Blackbeard’s Point.

Back in Nassau, Rogers executed other racalcitrant pirates in December 1718 and by 1725 the golden age of piracy was over. It had lasted barely 10 years and was conducted by about 30 pirate commodores and a few thousand crewmen who were "the models for some of fiction’s greatest characters.”